Quote from a TEFL course provider who shall remain nameless:
“Methodology is the most important thing. On 4-week courses, participants only receive 6 hours of teaching practice. You will have nearly the same number of hours on your first day of teaching. While observed and graded observation are useful, it is much more important to have an idea of how to plan and prepare an effective lesson, since the delivery comes with practice over months and months rather than a few hours on a course.”
Any comment?
TEFLtastic 
There would I’m sure be more TP and less theory/methodology if only it were easier to schedule. Most centres struggle to find suitable classes of ‘extra’ students for their trainees to bore and confuse.
While it’s good to have a range of ideas of what to do it is vital to demonstrate an understanding of what TEFL actually is.
I’d double the TP – and halve the theory on a cert level course. Totally ditching all the stooopid ideas [silent way anyone anywhere ever??] that have been discredited and focusing on classroom management and techniques like drilling, pair work, etc. etc. I’d also beef up the phonology and ensure trainees can really use the IPA to good effect in their lessons. This is one of the most useful things they do and one of the first things new teachers just ditch – a few weeks not using it and it gets forgotten..
I also think the unknown language learning entirely in L2 is a great idea but so often botched as to be nearly useless. It’s also extremely rare these days to be confronted with a class of total beginners who have never been in a classroom to learn English before.
There is also far too much emphasis on DIY lesson plans rather than executing a ready made recipe well – this is far more realistic than the notion that you’ll be forced to teach the present perfect with no materials…in the Amazon rainforest or outer Mongolia are we?
Sorry – long time no rant. Feel better for that.
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Ideally we would want more Teacher Practice, but the fact is you usually do only get about 6 hours per course, and to be honest, it doesn’t really matter if its six hours or 40 hours. It still reverts to zero on your first day in front of a live class. So i do believe there is a lot of truth in the above statement (“it is much more important to have an idea of how to plan and prepare an effective lesson, since the delivery comes with practice over months and months”)
Companies like TEFL Express are moving away from in-house courses and into a more virtual/online platform for this exact reason. It makes it more practical for the learner, and allows them to focus their full attention for quality content to help ensure the future teacher is ready for that classroom with a solid lesson, so they don’y have to worry about that end of the job once they begin. It seems to be the direction the field is going all around.
I think observations are best once you begin your work. That way the company can ensure you are performing to their standards as well as giving you the opportunity to learn from others, weather that be a director of studies, or you peers. All debating on who is doing the observing, you can always continue to learn a lot.
Great site by the way. Thanks for posting!
Adam
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^ I tend to agree with all of that. Well said!
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I think Matthew was agreeing with Andy rather than Adam, as that comment wasn’t put up until after Matthew’s.
I also agree with Andy. If you were going to train to be a footballer for 90 minutes, you wouldn’t do all 90 minutes of theory because you’d play more than that anyway in your first week, you’d spend almost all of that time training, playing and getting feedback on what you were doing wrong. Ditto driving, pottery, language learning, etc etc, and teaching EFL is exactly a practical skill like those things.
“You will have nearly the same number of hours on your first day of teaching.” is a particularly spurious argument, because those hours simply teaching are nothing like as useful for learning to be a good teacher as proper teaching practice on a course is – and anyway teaching practice on a course teaches you how to learn more from actually teaching. Also, most people won’t have six hours of observed and (fairly) graded lessons with useful feedback in their entire careers if they don’t get it on training courses.
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Well, as we all know, one of the greatest maxims of TEFL is that students learn by doing – in order to be really effective, any lesson is supposed to be 5% input and 90-95% of students “doing” language. So naturally it should follow that the same should go for learning how to teach. This could include more practice with planning, adapting ready-made coursebook materials and plans, etc.
There could also be more peer feedback – not that this would be included in the official grade, but as we also all know, students learn from each other as well as from teachers. Practice what you preach, course providers!
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You can’t necessarily say that all students learn all things best by doing, and it could be that teaching and learning languages are quite different. I also believe they are almost the same in that way, though.
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“You can’t necessarily say that all students learn all things best by doing”
I completely agree. I, personally, learn best from hands-on and doing things for myself. However, some cultures, like in China, learn mostly from drilling and repetition. Whether they learn best that way or not, it is the way they are taught throughout their schooling. So when we begin to teach English we have to, in a sense, first re-teach the students how to learn (not always of course, but a lot of the time and with a lot of the students per class).
This is the sort of aspect i’ve always appreciated feedback on personally. Things you might not notice without the help of others to point it out.
One other quick note on peer feedback and group evaluation while on the job. I’ve never seen anything constructive come from it. It is always just the whole group of teachers telling each other how great the teacher in question did, even if it was a terrible class. The teachers always want to get out and on with their day, so you never get any useful information. One peer ( a Director of Studies perhaps) observing and giving feedback is usually a lot more attentive and offers a good constructive critique of you lesson. It would be great to have that positive critique come from a large group of peers, but i’ve never seen it work myself.
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I think it’s good for trainees to observe each others lessons and perhaps sit in for some general feedback from the observer/assessor. But it’s mostly a waste of time to have them provide feedback. Great in theory – useless in practice.
Nowadays it is a simple procedure to video lessons and then run through it with the trainee providing feedback as you go along.
Sadly, observations while working have always been futile in my experience. Usually the observer knows little more than the observed teacher. It’s just a formality to generate paperwork for BC inspections.
More observation of good lessons well taught with feedback would really improve CELTA level courses. Watching another trainee make a hash of something is not apt to help much.
This discussion has made me think again of what should and shouldn’t be on a NEW CELTA course. What we still have is just what ‘has always been done’.
One thing I would want to see is an overall reduction of workload – by about 25%. As is trainees drown in paperwork and have little or no time to reflect on what they’re supposed to be learning.
There is a lot to cover, but you could streamline some of it and reduce the stress levels all round.
One area would be to provide lesson outlines for the Teaching Practice rather than expecting trainees to plan lessons from scratch. This too often leads to a trainee trying to use a doomed lesson plan and in the end learning nothing from the experience.
I’m also deeply skeptical of the learner profile project that consumes enormous amounts of time to little end. Typically trainees lift most of it out of ‘Learner English’ anyway.
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I took my CELTA in 2006 and was just this past weekend discussing the course with a friend who is about to begin. I basically told him the exact same views you just expressed. Very true, in my opinion.
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Alex wrote: “I think Matthew was agreeing with Andy rather than Adam, as that comment wasn’t put up until after Matthew’s. I also agree with Andy.”
^ That’s right.
This is a nice discussion with excellent points made on both ‘sides’. Andy mentions the pointlessness of going through the “catalog” of various old-school approaches like the Silent Way. Sure, raising awareness about pedagogical possibilities is good, but simplifying the history of ELT and meanwhile ignoring more recent – and important – perspectives is silly.
I don’t agree that the ‘language experience’ portion isn’t valuable because of the relative paucity of total beginners. What it really helps to drive home is the centrality of comprehensible input and affect. Trainees are helped by being ‘in the shoes’ of the language student – sweating, thinking silly thoughts, not wanting to ‘jump’ in public.
Adam wrote” “it doesn’t really matter if its six hours or 40 hours. It still reverts to zero on your first day in front of a live class”. I agree that there’s an unavoidable ‘reset’ when it’s time to fly solo on that first day of your first job, but if you DID have 40 hours of PT instead of six I don’t think it would be the same. Not just because 40 is more than 6, but presumably if a course were ‘built around’ teaching practice rather than theory you’d have been prepared in a fundamentally different way for that first day.
Alex wrote that “teaching practice on a course teaches you how to learn more from actually teaching.” This is a great insight! Yes, as others have mentioned, sometimes TP sessions really are junky. And we have to wonder about how they work as models for other trainees. We observe the CELTA trainer too little, I think. But yes, it’s all about trainees engaging in the learning process for teachers – working towards activating an analytical process for reflection in action. We don’t just plan a lesson, deliver the lesson, and move along to the next. I’m 10 years in and I’m still “practicing”. The feedback on PT sessions – from the trainers AND the other trainees – sets the stage for the necessary critical approach to pedagogical experiences.
Adam wrote “One other quick note on peer feedback and group evaluation while on the job. I’ve never seen anything constructive come from it. It is always just the whole group of teachers telling each other how great the teacher in question did, even if it was a terrible class.” It’s a shame isn’t it? It’s as if the collegial culture of the TEFL course completely *poof* disappears – whence constructive critical friends and folks working together to figure things out? All of a sudden everyone is a privateer and observation and feedback becomes a soulless pile of harmless – and useless – drivel. There are some good small-scale studies of the shift off of courses and into the ELT workplace world. I’ll try to remember/find them if anyone is interested.
Andy wrote: “I think it’s good for trainees to observe each others lessons and perhaps sit in for some general feedback from the observer/assessor. But it’s mostly a waste of time to have them provide feedback. Great in theory – useless in practice.”
I’d be interested to hear about your own experience here. Did you not give other trainees feedback? Did you not appreciate or learn anything from feedback you received from others? I really liked giving and receiving feedback from other trainees because together we constructed our own kind of scaffold. Yeah, the trainers are the ‘experts’…but like beginning language students, we actually learn a lot from each other, even learn each other’s faulty models..but that’s okay because that’s where we’re at. Think sociocultural learning and all that. It’s a social process in the main, in fact, “becoming a teacher”…not just the result of a transmission of a body of knowledge about teaching and learning.
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I never did a CELTA and went straight to a TESOL Dip which is unusual to say the least. I did shadow a Trinity Cert later on (as training to be a trainer) and although it was an excellent course very well run it still had many negative aspects.
The trainees did observe each other but peer feedback was bland and ill-informed to the point of being futile. I would allow time for trainees to chat informally rather than use class time for this. More honest and less threatening. On the course I was a trainer (a CELTA rip-off) there was a lot of time spent on peer observation and feedback and it was pretty much a waste of time. The blind leading the blind. It sounds great in theory but getting it to work in practice is the kicker.
Same goes for the unknown language. It MUST be taught in a sound TEFL manner and by a native speaker. Hard to accomplish. What we usually see is someone teaching a little Welsh or Gaelic. Done well it can be great – but since it is nearly impossible to do well would better be dropped altogether and the time spent on more observation of qualified teachers teaching well.
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